Open Culture's Journal

When the CIA Studied Psychic Techniques to Alter Human Consciousness & Unlock Time Travel: Discover “The Gateway Process”

By now, it’s widely known that the Central Intelligence Agency ran a decades-long program of experiments involving LSD and other psychoactive drugs called MKUltra from the nineteen-fifties to the seventies. As one might suspect, that wasn’t the only research project into the manipulation of human consciousness the CIA had going on in the twentieth century. Another, a study of something called the Gateway Process, has more recently come to wide attention through an unlikely channel. The relevant documents “had been declassified for decades — but a new, younger audience was introduced to the Gateway when TikTok caught on in 2021.”

So writes Elle’s Hannah Summerhill, a self-described “longtime seeker” receptive to the Gateway Process’ concept of harnessing not drugs but sound to “the art of becoming more conscious of one’s particular inner resources, inner abilities, and, most of all, one’s inner guidance.” The documentation breaks down the levels of focus thus theoretically achievable into a series of levels: Focus 10 is “a meditative state conducive to healing, psychic abilities, and remote viewing (the ability to ‘see’ objects in real time from a distance). In the deeper Focus 12 state, participants report meeting their higher selves; in Focus 15, they can manipulate time and channel a ‘strong and guiding’ God-like figure.”

All this was originally conceived by former radio executive Robert Monroe, whose self-experimentation with the effect of sound on human consciousness — the same phenomena exploited by study-and meditation-assisting “binaural beats” — led to his founding the Monroe Institute. “In the late stages of the Cold War, convinced that the Soviets were researching psychic abilities for espionage, the CIA tapped the Monroe Institute to explore these methods for themselves,” writes Summerhill. You can read Lieutenant Colonel Wayne McDonnell’s declassified July 1983 report on Monroe’s techniques here, as well as Thobey Campion’s breakdown of its main points at VICE here.

“A project like Gateway that marries science with the human yearning for meaning seemed awfully promising,” writes Popular Mechanics’ Susan Lahey. “But, as it turned out, the process was not a gateway between materialistic science and experiential consciousness; it was more like an effort to write a technical manual for the ineffable.” Even if it sounds plausible to you that a binaural beat-like sound recording “syncs the hemispheres of the brain into a single, powerful stream of energy, like a laser,” you may feel less confident when the report posits “a giant cosmic egg with a nucleus in the middle where the Absolute spews matter from a white hole into one side of the ovoid-shaped universe.” It seems that the CIA never did figure out a way to reliably engage in time travel, remote viewing or communication with the divine, but maybe the TikTokers will figure it out.

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How the CIA Funded & Supported Literary Magazines Worldwide While Waging Cultural War Against Communism

Read the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual: A Timeless Guide to Subverting Any Organization with “Purposeful Stupidity” (1944)

12 Million Declassified CIA Documents Now Free Online: Secret Tunnels, UFOs, Psychic Experiments & More

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.